12 Angry Cardinals
Why Conclave is a surprisingly good movie
In this curious time to be alive, on this curious corner of Substack, coming from this curious author, it might surprise you to learn that I don’t actually want to know the backstory of everything.
For example, I have no desire to know how pizza Pringles are made.
I’ve eaten pizza Pringles exactly once and the experience made me feel like a termite chewing through someone’s wall while people discussed a pizza in the other room.
How food scientists turned life-giving potatoes into this chemical abomination does not interest me.
I also no longer need to know how any entrepreneurs founded now famous companies.
I long ago hit my quoto of “how I built this” stories.
Ernest Hemmingway once said: “Critics are men who sit and watch a battle from a high place and come down to shoot the survivors."
How I built this stories feel like maps to treasure that’s already been plundered, a parade of victory laps when I’m just trying to lace up my shoes, blueprints for cathedrals when I’m out here pitching a tent in the rain.
Here are a few other things I don’t need to know any more about:
How billionaires spend their mornings
More reasons why processed food is bad for you—that pizza Pringle was education enough
If or why The Rock and Vin Diesel are still feuding— clearly it’s because they each refuse to star in a movie where they aren’t the biggest boy.
What method acting actually entails, only because I’ve watched half a dozen Youtube videos on it already. As far as I can surmise, the only thing anyone agrees on is that method acting is widely misunderstood, the only people to “go full method” are egotistical men, and the only person who has actually done it well is Daniel Day Lewis.
Why my new phone’s battery dies so fast in case the answer is the amount of Youtube videos I watch.
Until a few weeks ago I would have also included in this list: “how a new pope is chosen.”
There’s nothing more humbling and gratifying in life than being pleasantly proved wrong about something.
It’s like a Jiu Jitsu takedown from the world’s greatest hugger.
Having seen the movie Conclave I’m happy to report that in the hands of great filmmakers, even the esoteric minutiae of the Catholic Church can be gripping cinema.
Anyone in creative work could learn a lot from the first five minutes of this film.
It grabs you from the first frame. The cinematography is gorgeous and stylish, establishing a harsh and austere color palette defined by intense reds, blacks, and whites. The Vatican’s interior isn’t filmed like a holy temple, it’s shot like the inside of a prison, or a tomb.
Ah cinematography, you truly are the spirit fingers of filmmaking.
Yet you could just listen to the first five minutes and still get the same impression. Volker Bertelman’s score combined with the crisp editing and ominous sound design makes the opening scenes feel like a horror movie. By establishing a clear tone, style, and stakes early on, the filmmakers earn your interest and then reward you with a story that feels worthy of fascination.
At its core this is a very simple story about a bunch of men who must choose the next leader of the archaic, influential, yet fading club they’re all a part of. Yet told this way it’s a lean, gripping, and tense drama about power, legacy, and human frailty. It’s a movie that even people who don’t care about or openly loathe the Catholic Church can learn from and enjoy.
Just like the real life process of picking a pope, this movie transforms stuffy procedures, repetitive voting, and backroom negotiations into bombastic spectacle. How is this possible?
My sister had a great observation about Conclave that shed light on this. She pointed out that a huge risk in a movie like this is not being able to tell all of the old white men in matching robes apart. This is where the performances shine, drawing clear and compelling distinctions between the different cardinals. The characterization here is impeccable, offering stark differences that only grow clearer and more compelling over time.
Stanley Tucci plays the progressive one named Cardinal Bellini, because of course he does. I half expected his character to lead the rest of the cardinals in a pasta making class over Aperol Spritz’s at some point and was rather disappointed when this didn’t occur. Sergio Castellito’s slow-boiling performance of uber conservative Cardinal Tedesco ensures he takes the award for most punchable pope. Lucian Msamati’s Cardinal Adeyemi masterfully portrays a “lesser of two evils” candidate for pope, showcasing a believable mix of ego and frailty, an ambitious man whose past sins might be his undoing. John Lithgow plays a vain, deceitful, and scheming Cardinal Tremblay to perfection. Carlos Diehz steals the show as soft-spoken Cardinal Benitez, the dead Pope’s dark horse pick for his successor with a mysteriou s past serving as cardinal of Kabul. Ralph Fiennes, who we nicknamed Cardinal Voldemort, plays Cardinal Lawrence, the most fascinating one of all.
He’s a reluctant leader of the other cardinals who, despite not seeking the office for himself, keeps earning votes as he works to exhaustion to vet and promote the best candidate. Lawrence’s job throughout the film is to unearth the dirt on the other cardinals, which both fuels the plot and gives us an up close and personal look at how these are all fallible men. Even religious leaders have skeletons in their closets.
The middle act shines through the suspense and revelations driven by Cardinal Lawrence’s detective work. It becomes clear how much of a compromise this process entails: whoever they pick will be deeply flawed. What ends up mattering is whose flaws are most palatable and whose vision for the Church gives it the best chance of survival in a world that’s growing weary and suspicious of men in robes obsessed with their own power and influence.
What’s fascinating about the process of choosing a pope is how in many ways it feels like the antithesis of the American electoral process. These candidates don’t campaign for office. Quite the opposite, there appears to be an unspoken rule that they all have to say and act like they don’t want to be pope, despite the ego, ambition, and scheming that clearly state otherwise. Unlike picking a president, there are no primaries, no ads, and no Super PACs, just an iterative process of voting and coalition building that has to run its course. Remarkably, watching old men vote for the same people in slightly different configurations is utterly gripping.
The true triumph of Conclave may be that it’s a movie where a man photocopying sheets of paper and handing them out feels as intense as a bank heist. It’s all a testament to the finesse of the filmmaking, the voting scenes are assembled as precisely and captivatingly as the tennis scenes in Challengers.
New frontrunners emerge and fall. The factions within the church become clear. The backroom chats increase in intensity as the votes remain deadlocked. There’s some excellent shouting and moving monologues.
You haven’t seen this many angry cardinals since James Harrison picked off Kurt Warner and returned in 100 yards for a touchdown in Super Bowl XLIII.
Charlie, Alexis, and I all placed bets on which cardinal would end up being pope, each of us picking a candidate and rooting for them like it was fantasy football set in the Vatican. Alexis choose Stanley Tucci’s cardinal Bellini after she gave an impassioned monologue that used the word “daddy” a lot. Charlie chose Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence because he seemed like a clear, if reluctant, frontrunner and a voice of reason, like a Catholic Mitt Romney. I chose Carlos Diehz as Cardinal Benitez after he gave a lovely blessing of the food in both English and Spanish.
I won’t say who won in case it spoils the movie for you, but I will recommend that you do the same.
In high school Spanish class I recall emitting a decidedly immature giggle when I learned that the word for father, pope, and potato was the same word: papa. The only way to distinguish whether you’re talking about your dad, a religious leader, or a dirty ball of subterranean vegetable starch is which half of the word you emphasize and whether you use the masculine or feminine article.
Papá, El Papa, La papa
I won’t say how, but this trivia ends up being oddly relevant to this movie in multiple ways.
By the time the new pope is revealed, you share Cardinal Lawrence’s desperate need to know everything about him. After so many twists and turns and dramatic reveals, you crave certainty above all else. Yet the film does an artful job of reminding us that certainty, too, is a mirage.
Picking a leader means picking a person, not picking a deity or an ideal, and people are full of flaws, contradictions, and limitations. All you can do is choose the human being whose flaws you can live with and whose vision gives you hope.
While the film’s ending is surprising and unexpectedly hopeful given the grim tone and suspenseful middle act, it does not absolve the Catholic Church of its sins. We all know how deeply compromised the Catholic Church is in 2025, what kind of abuse priests have committed, and what they turned a blind eye to for so long. Spotlight won a best picture for dramatizing just how heinous the Catholic Church became and how its darkest secrets became common knowledge. The success of Spotlight made me deeply skeptical of Conclave.
Coming into this movie, I thought that a humanizing look of the people who strive and scheme to become pope was the last thing I’d want to spend two hours watching. Yet as Cardinal Benitez conveys in a soft-spoken yet devastating monologue at the film’s climax, we could all use more humility, empathy, and curiosity about the world around us. Against all odds, Conclave found a way to wrestle with the humanity of its characters without absolving the institution, leaving me unexpectedly moved and reflective. It reminded me that even in deeply flawed institutions, the struggle for power is ultimately a reflection of our own capacity for imagination, grace, and redemption.
Few recent movies have made me think and feel this deeply.
Go watch it.
I’d recommend having wine and/or snacks on hand to accompany the salacious drama, ideally popcorn, maybe potato chips, but definitely not pizza Pringles.